Davita's Harp (16 page)

There were songs in the play and an odd kind of music. I remember
best a speech against war that Johnny Johnson makes to the officers planning the big offensive. “End this killing—end it now…. Do it! Do it! … But you don’t listen…. You don’t want to end this war. There’s something black and evil got into you—something blinded you—something—”

I remember too an American priest and a German priest, both of them chaplains, praying together to God and to Jesus Christ, “Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies”—as two squads of gas-masked soldiers, Germans and Americans, are locked in hand-to-hand combat; and an American and a German fight each other with bare hands; and two soldiers, a German and an American, lie tangled and dying in barbed wire, their hands clasped in friendship; and surrendering German soldiers are machine-gunned by Americans; and surrendering American soldiers are machine-gunned by Germans; and Johnny Johnson holds in his lap the head of a dying soldier and offers him a drink of water—and the two priests saying together in the same breath, “Amen.”

We came out of the theater into the November night. A cold mist hung in the air. I walked beside my mother, still seeing the play and hearing the music. We crossed a street. I could see the subway station at the end of the block.

“He wasn’t crazy,” I said. “The others were crazy.”

My mother said nothing. She was huddled deep in her coat as if it were an arctic night.

“I didn’t understand it,” I said. “And I didn’t like the ending.”

We walked down into the subway station. The train came roaring out of its black tunnel. On the way back I fell asleep, my head against my mother’s shoulder, and woke with a stifled scream. People looked at me. I had dreamed of severed arms and legs scattered on a muddy field. War. My mother held me. I thought the ride would never end—the stops and starts, the lurching and rattling, the screaming metal wheels. I felt myself swooning with exhaustion when the train at last pulled into our station.

We climbed the stairs to the parkway and started home. The
streets were deserted. Sodden leaves lay underfoot and made watery sounds beneath my shoes. We went into the entrance hall and started up the stairs. Behind me I heard clearly the loud closing click of the hallway door. The harp played as we entered our apartment. We had barely put away our coats when someone knocked on our door. My mother went to it quickly. It was Mrs. Helfman.

She thought she had heard us come in, but hadn’t been sure. She had decided to come up and find out if we were back. She sounded out of breath. A cable had arrived for my mother in the late afternoon. She hoped it wasn’t bad news.

My mother thanked her in a quiet voice. Mrs. Helfman said again that she hoped it wasn’t bad news and turned and started for the stairs. The harp played as my mother closed the door. Standing near the door, my mother tore open the cable with trembling fingers. She scanned it, then read it to me. It was from my father, from Madrid. He was coming home.

That Saturday morning I rose early, dressed, and left the apartment. My mother was still asleep. I walked through streets deep in leaves to the building on Eastern Parkway named after David Dinn’s great-grandfather. Inside the room with the dividing wall, I sat in a chair directly against the curtain and searched for a loosened seam that might afford me a clear view of the men’s side of the room. I had to change seats three times before I found one.

Frayed edges of ninon fabric framed the view. A boy stood at the lectern, chanting. He seemed very young. I did not know what he was doing or saying: the book in my hands was all in Hebrew, which I could not read. The room was crowded. Abruptly everyone stood. The red velvet curtains along the far wall were parted; doors were opened; a long scroll-like object, garbed in a brocaded and beaded red cloth and topped with a silver crown, was removed from a wide closet set deep into the wall. The scroll was paraded around the men’s side of the room. Many of the men
placed a fringe of their white woolen shawl on this scroll and then touched the fringe to their lips. There were a number of young girls in the room, and they put their fingers on the scroll and then kissed their fingers. The scroll was placed on the podium that stood near the center of the room.

For about an hour, the same boy who had led the service read aloud from the scroll, in a rhythm and chant I had never heard before, his voice high and clear. All sat silent as he read. From time to time he would stop and one of the men at the podium would chant something and a hum of talk would fill the room. Then the scroll was raised high in the air and all stood. With everyone once again seated, the boy remained alone at the podium, chanting, swaying slowly back and forth, a thin pale-faced boy in a suit and tie and a small dark skullcap and the fringed white and dark-striped woolen garment over his narrow shoulders. Then he was done and a shower of small brown bags and bits of candy flew through the air amidst shouts of “Mazol tov! Mazol tov!” Children scurried about for the bags. A swelling rise of laughter and talk accompanied the rain of candy and the scampering of the children. Some minutes later the scroll, carried by the boy, was again paraded through the men’s side of the room and brought up to the closet in front of the room. All sang in response to the boy’s singing. I liked the music and tried to sing along.

Later, everyone stood in silence a long time, praying. And still later, David Dinn and his father rose together and recited the Kaddish. Others stood too, but I could not see them all for the narrowness of the open seam.

Afterward on the sidewalk in front of the building I moved slowly through the noisy throng to where David Dinn was standing with his friends.

“Hello,” I said.

He turned to me and said quietly, “Hello, Ilana.”

“Was that a celebration?”

“Where?”

“Inside. This morning.”

“That was a bar mitzvah,” he said.

“My God,” one of the other boys said. “She doesn’t know what a bar mitzvah is.”

“Are you Jewish?” another asked me.

“She’s Jewish,” David Dinn said. “Leave her alone.”

“Why is that curtain in the room?” I asked. “Why do the men and women sit separately?”

They all looked at me. One of them snickered loudly.

“It’s the law,” David Dinn said.

“What law?”

“Jewish law.”

“She’s not one of us,” a boy said.

“Where does she come from?” another asked.

“Can I ask one more question?” I said to David Dinn.

“Sure,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable.

“Is it the law that instead of helping you’re supposed to laugh at someone who’s trying to learn?”

They stood there, staring at me and saying nothing. All around us the crowd moved and surged, joyous, boisterous.

David Dinn’s father came out of the crowd, looking tall and courtly in his dark coat and dark suit and hat. “There you are,” he said to David. “And there
you
are, Ilana. How are you and how is your mother?”

“My mother is fine. My father is coming home.”

“He is? I’m glad to hear that. Is he well?”

“No. He was wounded in Madrid. He’s coming home to rest. My Aunt Sarah is a nurse in Spain. She’s bringing him back.”

His face darkened. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ilana.”

I saw David Dinn staring at me, his mouth open. The others had fallen very silent. The noise of the crowd rose and fell all around me like the back-and-forth rushing of surf in a storm.

Mr. Dinn said, “Why didn’t your mother—?” then abruptly stopped. He was silent a moment, his fingers tapping rapidly upon one of the buttons of his coat. He ran a finger along the inside of his shirt collar. Then he said to me, “Have a good Shabbos, Ilana.
I wish your father a speedy recovery. We must go now. Come, David.”

“Good Shabbos,” David Dinn said.

They stepped into the crowd and were gone.

I stood a moment amidst David Dinn’s friends. They all looked alike in their dark coats and hats and pale faces, all standing there and staring at me in silence.

I turned up the parkway and walked home alone.

A letter arrived from Jakob Daw. He was in Madrid.

“My dear Channah. I write in English to show you I have not forgotten the language we once studied together. I write to tell you that I have entirely ceased writing stories. Here things happen daily for which there are no words. One hears sounds that language cannot name: sounds from children and animals as the shells fall, sounds later when the shelling has stopped. Michael was with La Pasionaria at the Segovia Bridge. He will be hurt if he is not more careful. I tell him he has a beautiful wife and a lovely, sharp-minded daughter to go home to and care for. He answers that all the world is in peril now and if the Fascists win we are all doomed. He washes his face with water from a dirty basin in our bombed-out hotel and gets something to eat and rushes back to the front. And the front is everywhere, everywhere, all around Madrid. He is handsome, your Michael. How do you say it? Dashing. Yes. He has friends wherever he goes. I sit alone in my room. I have a drink sometimes with an officer who comes to visit and talks to me about my stories. Here there is a hell beyond the ability of even a Dante to depict. No words for it, no names. Kazantzakis said the other night that an officer told him the Spaniard has many souls inside himself and is all full of unreconciled and contradictory desires; he is a mixture of many races still uncrystallized. He loves life, but something in him cries out, ‘All this is nothing!’ Then he hungers for death. He goes from extreme to extreme, yearning, suffering. He has too much blood inside
him. Blood must be taken from him. He has a need to burst into violence. There is inhuman joy and passion in this war. And at the root of this passion is the despair at the possibility that all is nothing. Kazantzakis says that here there is madness. Spaniards talk of death as if it were a neighboring land where all go to visit sooner or later. Madness. Convulsions of hatred. Anarchy. A time of apocalypse. Can an entire people become insane? Can all of mankind go mad? Chaos is king in Spain. Here little children carry flags and guns. Here priests urge on the killing. All the air is filled with the song of a dying bird. Journalists watch the bombing raids with curled lips and sarcastic smiles; others are cold, indifferent. All is a prologue to a great catastrophe. How can one write stories? I saw a child Ilana Davita’s age lose her legs to a shell. Stories! How lovely Vienna was when we were there in our dream time. How sad that we did not know we were leaving forever our youthful lives. We might have bade good-bye in some appropriate way to those early years. How much there is to regret! What a cruel century we now live in! The cough is better in Madrid than it was in Switzerland. I shall try hard to restrain your impetuous Michael. You will please give Ilana Davita my most affectionate greetings. Jakob.”

The letter had been addressed to my mother, who had not told me about it. I found it on the desk in her bedroom one evening that week as I wandered about the apartment while she was in Manhattan. There was much in the letter I could not understand. But I understood enough.

Later that evening I stood at my window gazing down at our darkening street. How quickly the green life had gone from the trees! Would my room be cold again in the coming winter? Probably we would move again soon. The lamp-post lights came on, sudden yellow-white pools in the evening’s shadows. Behind me the apartment seemed to pulse with menacing words. Death as a neighboring land. I did not understand that. All the air is filled with the song of a dying bird. What did that mean? Perhaps I should not have read the letter. Perhaps I really hadn’t understood
it. But no more stories! I understood that. What would happen now to the little bird?

Through my window I saw Mr. Helfman walking along the street on the way back from work. He taught Hebrew and Bible at the school named after David Dinn’s great-grandfather. He went up the front steps. I heard the clear echoing click of the closing hallway door. I lay down on my bed and thought of Jakob Daw.

On Saturday afternoon in the first week of December a cab pulled up at our house. My mother and I went racing downstairs. Aunt Sarah stood on the curb, wearing a nurse’s uniform and a wide dark-gray cape. She was helping my father out of the cab. He seemed unable to move his right leg.

“Hello, Annie!” my father called out when he saw my mother. “I’m back in one piece!”

My mother bit her lip and held back her tears. She did not kiss him. I saw Ruthie and her parents looking at us through the bay window of their living room. All up and down the street people were looking at us.

“Hello, my love!” my father said to me. “Christ, how you’ve grown! Look what’s happened to your old dad. Be very careful, love. No hugs now. Give us a hand, Sarah. The steps will be tricky.”

My aunt and the cabdriver helped him up the stairs and into the apartment. He glanced at the singing harp as he came through the door. “Hello!” he said to the harp. “Are you glad to see me? I’m damn glad to see you!”

My aunt and my mother took him into the bedroom and closed the door. The cab drove away.

I waited in the hallway outside the bedroom. I had almost not recognized him. He had lost a great deal of weight and seemed smaller now than when he had left. His face had a yellowish cast that accentuated and darkened the blueness of his eyes. His wavy
brown hair had been cut very short and I could see clearly the stark whiteness of his scalp. Later my mother explained to me that he had been ill for a while in Spain with a stomach sickness called dysentery. Now he was recovering from a sickness of the liver called jaundice and from a deep wound in the hip caused by the fragments of an exploding grenade.

He lay in the double bed in my parents’ bedroom. My mother, white-faced, rigidly calm, borrowed a cot from Mrs. Helfman and placed it next to the double bed. Aunt Sarah moved into the room across the hallway from me.

The last of the leaves fell from the trees. The weather turned bitter cold.

Strangely, my room remained warm.

In some houses in the neighborhood little candles burned in the windows. Ruthie told me one night as we played together in her living room that the candles were in celebration of a Jewish holiday called Chanukkah. There had been a war a long time ago, she said, to free the Jews from pagan conquerors. The candles were for the miracle that had happened during that war when the temple in Jerusalem had been recaptured from the pagans and re-dedicated to God.